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The point is, Miller now had a new set of peers: Tour players.
"He didn't smoke and he didn't drink," O'Connor reminds us, and Miller certainly had no use for those pungent cigarettes that some players and caddies fired up back at the motel. "Johnny didn't condemn people if they had a drink, but they condemned him if he didn't. He had a different lifestyle. He wasn't in the group." Miller, a committed Mormon and family man, was swimming against the tide of the '70s.
That didn't bother him. What bothered him, his friends say, was the sight of Linda and the children in the driveway, the littlest one crying, when he'd drive off for two or three weeks of tournament golf. As the years went by, as he racked up a eight-win season (1974) and socked away a British Open title (1976), the divide between Tour time and family time became untenable, and Miller — an unsentimental man — simply drifted off the circuit.
MILLER, carrying his blue blazer on a hanger, walks through a desert wash toward the NBC compound. The setting sun reveals traces of the pancake makeup he applied before going on the air. ("Hey, look," Faldo had teased, "he's covering himself in makeup!") Miller doesn't seem to be in a hurry.
"I'm in a really good place right now," he says. "My family's doing well. I feel like I'm in my prime as an announcer." He stops and looks back toward the clunky silhouette of the announcer's booth, a crate on stilts. "It's one of the rarest jobs in the universe, and now there's only two of us, two lead announcers," Miller says. "I consider it an honor."
This is a different Johnny Miller. Less driven. Unconflicted.
His friends see it. On a recent hunting trip, Miller sat with Gregoire in a fog-shrouded blind from dawn until afternoon, with just one dead duck between them. "Anybody who knows Johnny knows he can't sit still more than 15 minutes," Gregoire said afterward. "So for us to sit there in the fog with one duck for 6 hours and 45 minutes..."
Why the change? Gregoire shrugs. "He needed it. He's been burning the candle at two ends for 40 years." Oh, and Miller will soon turn 60, "and he's beginning to realize there's only so many shopping days till Christmas," Gregoire says.
"All my friends are shocked," Miller says, studying the sunny side of a giant saguaro cactus. "I've always been in a rush, trying to do everything at 85 miles an hour. I was too tight. The last two years, I've tried to slow down and not try to put too many things into one day."
Is a slowed-down Miller a gentler and kinder commentator?
"Maybe," he says. "I've made a resolution to not be quite as hard on the players. I don't know if NBC will like that idea, but I'm trying to be fair."
The catalyst for the change, he adds without irony, was CBS's decision not to rehire Lanny Wadkins as its lead golf analyst — the rap on Wadkins was that he was bland and too protective of players' feelings. "Lanny said when you get away from the game you forget how hard it is to hit good shots," Miller says. Then he nods, as if he's never heard this argument before. "I learned a good lesson from Lanny. I'll probably try to be a little kinder."
The cactus, looking down on Miller, is unconvinced.
So are his colleagues on the NBC golf team, which has built its old-prostalking-on-the-couch coverage around Miller's astringent style. Says Maltbie, "We all have a filter that keeps us from cussing in front of our moms or the minister — not that Johnny would do that — but it's a filter he doesn't possess. If it's in his head, it's going to come out of his mouth." Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, says Miller is just like television's other JMs, John McEnroe and Joe Morgan.
"None of them has a governor," Ebersol says. "You're getting them just the way they are."
Miller's colleagues might worry if they saw him pulling back on his preparation, but he still goes out early on broadcast days to take copious notes on the course setup. Before today's show, for instance, he drove out to the first green to see if an invisible pitch mark was really responsible for the four-foot putt Tiger Woods missed yesterday on the first playoff hole of his loss to Nick O'Hern.
"Tiger was right," Miller said upon his return. "The grass has grown up and been mowed level, but I felt around with my fingers, and there was a crater nobody's ever fixed. You can't see it, but it'll cause a ball to veer, for sure." Asked why he had bothered to do what no other on-site journalist had — actually check Tiger's claim — Miller shrugged. "I just thought I had to do it," he said.
Minutes later, after taking over from Faldo, Miller used the first commercial break to inform Hicks that he'd searched for the pitch mark.
"What'd you see?"
Miller waved him off. "We've got to do it impromptu, on the air. I don't want to skew your thinking." Hicks nodded, and the two men sat quietly, lost in thought.
"Five seconds ... Four ..."
Three fingers, two fingers, one.
